Individuals and corporations need information to function and do business in an information driven society. Increasingly, individuals and corporations are expressing a preference for receiving information in real time through portable electronic devices. Examples of portable electronic devices used to receive real time information include cellular telephones, pagers, personal digital assistants, geographical positioning systems, and palm size computers. Generally, these portable electronic devices have a small information display area. For example, a personal digital assistant typically has a flat panel display having an information display area of six or seven square centimeters. Many users of portable electronic devices would prefer a large information display area. Unfortunately, several problems arise when flat panel displays are scaled up and combined with portable electronic devices.
As the display area of a flat panel display is increased, the surface area of the electronic device devoted to the display increases. Since portable electronic devices also include data entry features, such as input keys which utilize some of the surface area of the device, any increase in the surface area of the device devoted to the electronic display decreases the area available for data entry features. Since the trend in portable devices is to include more function in each device, it is undesirable to reduce the data entry features in a particular device in order to increase the area available for the display of information.
A second problem with flat panel displays is that large flat panel displays consume a large amount of power. Increasing the area of the display increases the amount of power required to drive the display. For example, a flat panel display having 1000 pixels requires more power than a flat panel display having 100 pixels. In addition, displays that rely on phosphorescent pixels require extra power to excite the phosphor in the pixels. Providing extra power to a display requires increasing the size of the power supply in the portable electronic device, which increases the size of the portable device. Since portable electronic devices are usually designed to fit in a shirt pocket, any increase in the volume of the devices decreases the portability of the devices.
Therefore, scaling flat panel displays is not a good solution to the problem of increasing the display area of portable electronic devices.
For these and other reasons there is a need for the present invention.